Death of the Honda society

Richard West

Bangkok Roving reporters are often accused of basing their first dispatch on what they are told between the airport and the capital. I shall do so unashamedly. The taxi-driver I found Was Very pleased with the air-conditioning in his Japanese car and so was I for the heat was shattering after an English summer. I told the driver I wanted to get a hotel around the far end of the Suriwong Road, but Peter (for so he had introduced himself) insisted that this was not possible. There had been heavy rains in Bangkok that morning, and very bad floods close to the river. ,Why did I not try a certain hotel — he happened to have its card on the dashboard — that lay on our route into town? I smiled, knowing the way of taxi-drivers, and said I would take a look at any hotel he mentioned but nevertheless, wanted to go down to the river. His hotel turned out to be one I had visited ten years before when I Was writing an article on 'rest and recreation, bases for the Americans from Vietnam. There was something unspeakably sad about such hotels, where the fear and misery of the GIs seemed only to grow with each day snatched from the hell of PhuBai or Camp Eagle. I returned to the taxi and asked Peter to head once more for the end of the Suriwong Road. He pointed to overflowing gutters and patches of flooding and said it would soon get worse.

He asked which hotel I wanted to go to and when I mentioned the so-and-so he shook his head and said it had changed since I stayed there four years ago. 'It is cheap but very much crime. Two Americans were murdered there last week. Thieves took all their money and jewellery. Security is very bad.' I mentioned another hotel in the district but this, he said, was full of hippies who bought and sold drugs such as heroin. I smiled at these warnings, although I learned afterwards that everything he had told me was true.

A few minutes later the traffic grew worse which did not square with what Peter was telling me of the petrol shortage. 'In Thailand today gasoline is very expensive and often we can't buy it. Thailand's a poor country and all our gasoline used to come from Iran. Often now you see cars lying in the street where people have left them because they have no gasoline. Now everything is expensive. Taxis are expensive because of the gasoline. Hotels are expensive because of the electricity and the airconditioning.' And modern Bangkok is built of those box, cement houses which make life unbearable without airconditioning.

We reached the Victory Monument and soon afterwards came to a halt in a four-lane traffic jam. The cars in the opposite lanes were making some progress, but we made none. After about 15 minutes, the engine began to steam from the heat of the sun and Peter grew anxious. He muttered something about the air-conditioning, too embarrassed to say straight out that if it was not switched off the car would break down. I got the point and we switched off the cool draught. He apologised for the heat that immediately overcame us and said that the 'air-conditioning' only worked when the car was in motion. But of course if the car is in motion, you open the windows and catch the breeze and do not need the airconditioning.

About every ten minutes we moved a few yards until we came to a small hotel where Peter suggested I check in, as indeed I was glad to do. The reception staff confirmed what Peter had said about the floods. It would take from two to three hours to drive the two or three kilometres to the river, 'but maybe an hour on foot, if you try hard.' The security here is good,' said Peter. The security was indeed rigid. 'May I see your passport, air ticket and travellers cheques', said the lady at the reception desk, 'these must all be put in the safe. If you bring a woman into your room, you must pay 100 bahts extra.' There was a desk clerk on each floor to enforce this rule, and provide the girls.

Security is so strict here that the bedroom windows, are firmly barred and the fire escape door is padlocked. When I mentioned this to the receptionist, she giggled. 'If there's a fire, we fry like eggs,' I said, at which she giggled even louder and passed on the joke to a colleague. Once, many years ago, I found a padlock stopping the fire exit of one of the grandest hotels in Bangkok.

From next day's Bangkok Post I learned that the flooding had been the result of the heaviest rainfall the city had known for 25 years. More than six inches had fallen during the small hours of the morning, and many streets had been waist-high in water. My slight inconvenience could not compare with that of the woman who stepped into a man-hole and disappeared from sight before being rescued from drowning, or indeed that of General Lek Neaomali, the Minister of the Interior, who took three hours to reach his office and afterwards lambasted the city council, saying sarcastically: 'Nobody can solve the flood problem in Bangkok unless wp build a roof over the 'whole city.' The traffic is not as appalling as that of cities like Lagos and Teheran, where motor-car mania thrives on the wealth of oil. But if the traffie is not as bad, the problems caused by a world-wide fuel shortage are still more horrendous than those in the richer countries. Indeed one has to get away from western Europe, America and Japan to understand the seriousness and the imminence of life without petrol.

I have in the past remarked on the threat of the petrol shortage to white southern Africans in Salisbury and Johannesburg, where the motor-car is a means of escape from possible racial violence. In countries like Thailand, oil is essential to keeping the urban, capitalistic and technological society which has been superimposed on a peasant land. Bangkok for all its four and a half million people is really an artificial city living off service industries such as banking, communications, commerce and tourism.

Bangkok is also very extravagant. I was here for a few days during that winter of 1973-74 when, as a result of the Yom Kippur war, the world was facing its first major fuel crisis, several countries banned the sale of petrol at weekends, the Dutch took to their bicycles, and a British cabinet minister instructed us on how to shave in the dark. That winter, I and one or two other journalists working in Indo-China were offered the job as manager of an English pub in Bangkok. A tempting post that included a flat, free meals and drink, and the help of half a dozen Thai waitresses. But how could one work at such a time in a place that boasted of being the only bar in Bangkok with both air-conditioning and a log fire?

The spendthrift use of oil on motor cars, air-conditioning, petro-plastics and all kinds of electric lighting and gadgetry, is just as flagrant in eastern Asia as it is in America or western Europe. The Japanese have turned much of their country into a hell of traffic jams and fumes but they at least can afford to do so. at any rate for a few more years. The economic expansion of eastern Asia though far more spectacular than ours in the West is not very firmly based in newer industrial countries like South Korea. Taiwan and Hong Kong, and is frailer still in most of the Asian countries such as Thailand. Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Their recent prosperity could be short-lived.

Even South Vietnam, during 'the time of the Americans' seemed to share the apparent glamour of modern consumer society. Transistor radios. TV sets, above all Honda motor-bikes, poured into the country. As long ago as 1966 I heard the surprise of an Australian cameraman who had just seen two Vietnamese girls riding to school on a Honda: leez. I never thought I'd see Asian Sheilas mechanised.' At about the same period I was told by an idiotic US aid official: 'We're going to get rid of the commies when every peasant in this area has a second Honda in his garage.' He wanted to build in Vietnam 'a get-up-and-go greedy society'.

All such dreams had already vanished before the Communists took Saigon. The glamorous gadgets of capitalism disappeared with the US troops as early as 1972. Many people took to their push-bikes again or took a bus or walked to work. If they had any work. The death of the Honda society was brought home to the Saigonese in December 1973 the month of the international fuel crisis when Communists blew up a Shell depot outside town, causing a blanket of smoke and darkness at noon. (Zimbabwe guerrillas pulled off the same trick recently on the fuel depot in Salisbury).

Only ten years ago. one was written off as reactionary and romantic for praising those Eastern countries that did not embrace the ethic of Japanese and American capitalism. Cambodia, God rest her soul, was the first of these countries under the leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. His capital Phnom Penh was not without cars, of course, but most people went by bicycle or on foot. The country's earnings from agriculture were spent on sensible things like food, sarongs, good schools, temples, alms for the Buddhist monks, traditional dancing and water festivals.

That great civilisation was smashed by war in 1970 and can never reappear. War may also destroy the civilisation of Burma, the other south-east Asian country that tried to rcsist both Communism and capitalism. Those few Western journalists who have got into Burma tend to deplore the lack of automobiles, mass-manufactured goods, a tourist industry and an economic infrastructure and growth rate. Reactionaries and romantics are not disturbed by this. The old European quarter is fading with disuse, although the Strand Hotel maintains its dignity and the rule that gentlemen must wear a jacket and tie in the bar of an evening. There are few new cars. I have seen boys racing on roller skates in one of the principal avenues, also a local game, something like touch rugby played by two teams of women in one of the side streets. However, the poorer quarters of Rangoon are very much cleaner, quieter and pleasanter than the slums of Bangkok or Djakarta, The houses, constructed of wood in a style to attract cool breezes, are suitable to a climate daunting even by south Asian standards. The economy is said to be very inefficient, and 10 per cent of the Gross National Product is spent on gold leaf to stick on the statues of Buddha or so I once read.

Of course, it has been and will be argued that people demand the joys of technological civilisation; they do not want to remain in a 'living museum'. But this specious argument may now be getting out of date, as poorer countries find it impossible to maintain their present enjoyment of cars, airconditioning, jet travel. TV and the rest.

The latest cover story in Asia Week entitled 'Asia and the Crisis of 79.' refers not to Indo-Chinese refugees but the international oil crisis. 'In Malaysia, school bus operators, hard hit by a diesel shortage, jam a service station with about 50 buses for an hour in protest against alleged discrimination in the sale of fuel. A leading international bank predicts that consumer prices in Indonesia will rocket 20-25 per cent by the end of this year. In the Philippines, a garment man ufacturer, lender pressure from soaring synthetic prices, fears that the clothing market. is facing a collapse reminiscent of 1975.' Some of the Asian countries are plan fling, of talking of planning, action to cut the consumption of oil. Singapore has placed a surcharge on big cars, Thailand has done some reseal:eh on 'gasohol', made from sugar or rice. spirit. South Korea has progressed with solar energy. But this year, as in the first, international fuel crisis, the poor and less rich countries will get little support from the, major producers of oil and the major industrial powers. Japan, which had promised to,:help its clients and friends in the Asiantipup, now indicates that she will look aftefher own interests first. Nothing is hoped for .,from' Britain, West Germany, France ark! the United States, whose leaders, meet with the Japanese for economic. talks next month in Tokyo. Resentnient against the great economic powers may partly explain the apparent callousness Qf Thailand and neighbouring countries toWards the refugees from IndoChina. During thedast fortnight, Thailand has sent backtseveral thousand Cambodians and plans to return 40,000 more; the Malay;have threatened to shoot at the nest load of boat‘people and send back to sea those 60,000 now living in camPs; Indonesia will take no more, and even Hong Kong will do so very unwillingly. All these countries regard the refugees as a threat to their economic and social life at a time when, because of the oil crisis, they can least afford it. The Thais have been much enraged: by moral reproaches from countries like the United States and the unspeakable Sweden that will not the selves take refugees, nor help Thailand over her oil sumps. The editbi of the Far East Economic Review the Much respected Derek Davies, has gone 'so far, as to blame the United States for the very exodus of the boat people from Vieinam. After discussing American feelings of guilt about their role in Vietnam, he says that the wrong lies in the fact that the refugees are not leaving Vietnam todtiy as a result of the war but because the Carter Administration ohs" tructed any flow of aid to Hanoi. This policy has pushed Vietnam into the arms of the, Soviet *Union, ensured the triumph °' Hanoi's hard-liners and led to the crackdown onithe ethnic Chinese (grist to -Moscow's mill).' It could also be that Vietnam needed the money she gets from the refugees to pay f0r,. the oil for her tanks and airplanes, in or°e' to meet thenext expected attack frog' China. Indeed this fighting with China MaY have arisen over the off-shore area said to be rich in oil, which both countries have claimed as their. territorial water. This MaY be one of , those oil wars, predicted bY gloomy see0 askely to come before the end of art .century or of the world whichever eomek first. You reach soMbre: conclusionsAke this after getting into a taxi at Bangkol'airport.